Repairing the waves

Heaven's Coast is a brilliant exploration of grief

by JULIET WATERS

Shortly after Mark Doty's lover dies of AIDS, poet Alfred Corn sends him a letter in which he describes a metaphor he's been working on. It centres on a Japanese cup which was once the sole possession of a holy monk. Hundreds of years after the monk's death, the cup is dropped and broken, but because it is too precious to throw away, someone solders the crack with gold. "I think our poems are like that," writes Corn, "repairing the break in what can never be restored perfectly."

Doty's autobiography, Heaven's Coast, is like that too--a heartbreaking but beautiful examination of raw grief. It traces the final year of his eight-year relationship with Wally Roberts and the year after Roberts's death, with an acute emotional precision which transforms an intolerable and terrifying experience into a precious confrontation with reality. It is a confrontation that will deepen the perspective of anyone who reads it, regardless of one's experience or inexperience with the AIDS epidemic.

The setting of this work which is elegy, romance and intimate philosophy is the winter coast of Provincetown. Here Doty and Roberts buy a house together and live through the excruciating ironies of AIDS. At a time when Roberts would otherwise be entering his intellectual prime, he's deteriorating with a rare brain disease. While after eight years many couples might be suffering through an erosion of enthusiasm for each other, for this couple every normal moment of irritation and guilt is put into stark perspective and every moment of kindness and tenderness is intensified. When many people their age are staring down the terrifying responsibility of starting a family, this couple is facing the energy and responsibility involved in ending one.

Yet at the core of these ironies is a paradox which allows death both cruelty and kindness. It is, as Doty writes, "one of the paradoxes at the heart of the world: the Whirlwind is indifferent, but this indifference is utterly, profoundly good... too large and brilliant for us to see, though sometimes we can feel the edge of the storm." The concept of Heaven for this poet includes as much bitterness, chaos and passion as it does acceptance, release and tranquillity.

It's an exceptional book, with one imperfection. The strongest eulogies inform us of the deceased's flaws as lovingly as his strengths, since there's no real tragedy in the death of saints. Unfortunately, there's also a sentimentality in the portrait of Roberts, and all the attention to his naïve virtues may have ended up diminishing him. Roberts's transition from the more dominating partner of the first years of their relationship to his entire emotional and physical dependence on Doty is managed too easily. He becomes such a fragile figure that one begins to suspect that there must have been much more to him. Doty shows such a wonderful capacity for empathetic but unmerciful bitchiness toward more than a few insensitive acquaintances, ghoulish and banal caregivers, and exploitative and dysfunctional victims of AIDS. It's hard to believe that he hasn't repressed this talent in his description of Roberts.

But the beatification of his lover is a small and understandable indulgence in a book that is ultimately a tremendous act of self-sacrifice. It must have been an unbearable experience to write­and write this well­during a time when most survivors are investing every bit of energy they have into going through the simple motions of life. Heaven's Coast proves that memoirs are, at their best, never a self-indulgent genre. The attempt to form meaning out of the details of your own life is probably one of the most challenging and impossible projects there is.

The brilliance of this book transcends the specific experience of partners of AIDS victims and is a gift to anyone who reads it. And even though it's not traditional to give gifts at Easter, get this book for yourself, or anyone you know who could use a strong dose of soul resurrecting.

Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, Harper Perennial, paperback, $18.50, 305 pp.